Friday, December 12, 2014

Mobile Frame Zero: Scales, Sizes and Standards

First this is a 'living document'.

What do we mean by living document? Essentially as the game grows and evolves, so will this post. Any major/additions changes and I will re-post to the usual places but I don't think any feed sources will update.

Purpose: A reference/guide for players of Mobile Frame Zero series about scale, sizes and standards. This isn't official but pulls info heavily from the Hanger (MF0 forum) via discussion and/or 'word of god(s)' and sometimes my own crazy thoughts.

Scale: a comparable value of in game size compared to our real world. The scale size is referring to how big is a human at this scale.

You and your friends can set any scale/size for your games but some choices might cause you to have to tweak the rules when it comes to ranges.

In the community we generally refer to scale by plates (as in the smallest height of LEGO) with a number in front to indicated how many plates for example 7p. What is this referring to? People. 7p plates is roughly equal to a person (or 6p, or 4p, that is how tall people are).

Stud

Why do we care about that? Well, it effects the look of your cover/stations. With the reference of how big a person is (you), you know how to build everything else in relation to that.

What about Size? Well, we are talking about the volume that your frame takes up and out point of reference here for measurement is a stud for width and depth while using a brick for height so 10 stud (wide) x10 (stud) deep x 12 bricks (tall). We refer to this simple as The Box.

Why this box? Well the best two reasons I can give is 1) the rules work well with your frames not breaking the Size suggestion and 2) This is the general assumption Soren used when making the iconic MF0 frames.

Brick

As for 1) I mean, the bigger you get out of the box the easier it is to get shot while gaining no real benefit besides look factor.

So at 7p Scale using the The Box the rules work very well and you have a nice scale to work with when it comes to building stations and your cover.

The Box

Box Checker

Visualizing 7p Scale

As we discussed above 7p is how tall a human is on the battlefield but what does that mean to everything else? Let's basic down to the most basic by starting with average human height at 5'10" (1.8 meters) but lets just round that to 6' (1.8 meters and humans will be taller in the future anyways).

So there is the low end, but let's take this to another common reference in the game: the chub. The chub is roughly 21 plates tall meaning it is a rough 18 feet tall or three times taller then the average human. That seems about right and fits well into the default setting for MF0 (of course feel free to make your own setting).

So we have people, the plate, the chub but what about THe Box?

(a lot of adjusting is about to happen to keep math easy) The brick is 3 plates tall and just over 2 plates wide giving as a rough height of 30 inches or 2.5 feet (0.75 meters) and a width of 21 inches or 1.75 feet (0.50 meters).

Breaking Down Further
If your interested in smaller scales such as 4p and below then you should checkout No B.S. Just A.B.S. 's entry about Scale as well.

-So You want to Play Minifigure Scale

Before I begin I will say this is just my opinion/research and has not yet been play tested. Anyone who takes this and tries it out please let me know how it went BUT Joshua tweeted a bit about the basics ideas I had and tweeted back this:

@Shades_Corvid A minifig with a hat or hair would come out just right, then! Your other scaling makes sense to me, too.
— Joshua A.C. Newman (@JoshuaACNewman) January 8, 2015

Take that as you will.

7p Ruler

14p Ruler

So I sized up the minifigure (12 plates) and started the math to figure out the scale and how things would need to change. Short answer is it got complex and what I would call silly. So I came up with this instead. Just double the scale and everything else then just call it minifigure scale.

So yes, 14p scale(5 inches per plate) is what I think minifigure scale should be with the minifigure is two plates short just like the microfigure is one plate short. With that though everything needs to double as well.

11 comments:

I have and it a great page but I wanted to think through it myself plus I already have ideas to keep going. The first planned update is pictures of course then minifigure scale including how to adjusts the ranges.